It might only have been a half day event this year but the OVAB Digital Media Summit in New York this week was fantastic and one of the big takeaways was that OVAB member companies have yet again raised the bar – taking a monumental HUGE step to provide third party, comparable audience data to the advertising community.

At the summit OVAB announced that eleven of its member companies have completed third party audience research studies based on the Audience Metrics Guidelines published by OVAB back in 2008.

Suzanne La Forgia, President of OVAB told us “This announcement marks a significant shift as a large group of networks made the investment to move beyond traffic measures as their media currency to data based on audience impressions. Their data will give advertising decision makers the information they need to compare them with other traditional forms like television, the Internet and print,”

She added “OVAB companies are releasing their data to their key agency and advertising partners now and will continue to over the next several months. We look forward to more announcements like this as more research stu
dies are completed.”

While the individual networks release their data to the market, OVAB will conduct educational training seminars and meetings for agencies and advertisers to further educate them on what this move to audience research data means to them.

Ryan Laul, Managing Director, Posterscope – Hyperspace and member of OVAB’s Agency Advisory Board said “Third party audience research is key to us evaluating place-based digital and video advertising networks. Networks that provide us audience data make our jobs of incorporating this medium into our overall strategies easier and will give clients more confidence to grow their investments.”

Personally we think that this quote from Ryan should be printed out and stuck on every the desks of every wannabbe media owner out there!! It’s a simple concept, measure what you have, prove to me it’s value and something that folks like Rob Winston, Senior Account Manager at Arbitron always talk about wherever they go.

Well done to all of those involved. It is an incredibly strong take up – something like well more than half of the membership (some members are vendors of course and not media owners or networks) the next question is when we will see something like this in Europe. It’s much needed.

About the OVAB Audience Metrics Guidelines and Disclosure Forms

Published in October 2008, the OVAB Audience Metrics Guidelines (“Guidelines”) are a rule book for digital and video place based advertising networks and their research providers to follow in order to capture comparable audience data that will allow the advertising community to compare their audience data to that of other media platforms (like TV, internet, radio, etc.). Core to the implementation of the Guidelines is transparency, the disclosure of research methodology and consistency of terminology. The Guidelines and OVAB Member Disclosure Forms can be downloaded at www.ovab.org/content/resources